Money for war. Crumbs for humans. Working class pays for corporate sins. GOP killing their own.
The Feds decided to take more money away from the working class. GOP leaders, pundits, & faux-news hosts are causing the deaths of their followers. We have no problem spending billions on arms & war.
Jerome Powell and our Federal Reserve decided to tax us for the sins of the corporations completely responsible for inflation. Inflation isn’t some magical device of the market system. It is a feature of an unfettered capitalist market based on one tenet. The corporations with pricing power will price things at whatever the market will bear. They will tweak prices higher to ensure they take your last available dollar. Only some have the privilege to invest in any significant form given living standards.
The Federal Reserve System is the central bank of the United States. It performs five general functions to promote the effective operation of the U.S. economy and, more generally, the public interest.
The Federal Reserve
conducts the nation’s monetary policy to promote maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates in the U.S. economy;
promotes the stability of the financial system and seeks to minimize and contain systemic risks through active monitoring and engagement in the U.S. and abroad;
promotes the safety and soundness of individual financial institutions and monitors their impact on the financial system as a whole;
fosters payment and settlement system safety and efficiency through services to the banking industry and the U.S. government that facilitate U.S.-dollar transactions and payments; and
promotes consumer protection and community development through consumer-focused supervision and examination, research and analysis of emerging consumer issues and trends, community economic development activities, and the administration of consumer laws and regulations.
The words sound great, but unfortunately, there is little support for the consumer, the working class. The Feds recently increased the interest rate once again. Powell claims it is the only option he has.
As I have written about many times, the sole cause of inflation is corporate greed, negligence, ineptitude, and false scarcity. The war in Ukraine and COVID are convenient excuses we have been trained to accept as fact.
There was never an oil shortage; it was always a false scarcity. That is why even though we virtually kept using the same amount, there were never gasoline stations without gasoline. They knew Americans had extra savings from not spending during the pandemic and from a stimulus. They did not allow Americans to keep that money. They used inflation to steal it, and it shows up in their profit margins. I explained that in an interview on the Muslim TV Network after one of their producers read one of my bogs incredulously.
The corporate class blames the pandemic for the supply-chain component of inflation. The truth is that they chose profit over economic security with a failed model known as just-in-time-inventory, which leaves no slack for hurricanes, political upheavals, pandemics, and the like. Please read this blog post I did with Professor/Economist Dr. Richard Wolf regarding the who and blame for inflation.
Stop raising the interest rates. Let the government, we the people, force corporations to accept their responsibility and absorb the costs.
Have you noticed that most Democrats and Republicans continue to fund anything with arms, war, and the defense industrial complex without significant complaints or voting setbacks? Well, it continues. Common Dreams reports the following.
In an overwhelming bipartisan vote late Thursday, the U.S. Senate passed legislation authorizing $858 billion in military spending for Fiscal Year 2023, a sum that drew dissent from just a handful of lawmakers and outrage from watchdogs who said the money should be spent on fighting the climate emergency, poverty, and other pressing crises.
The $858 billion budget amounts to a roughly 10% increase from the previous year and $45 billion more than the historic sum President Joe Biden requested, and it was approved even after the Pentagon failed yet another audit, unable to account for more than 60% of its assets.
Much of the newly authorized money, as analyst Stephen Semler has shown, is likely to wind up in the pockets of military contractors. The NDAA passed by a vote of 83 to 11.
"This absurdly inflated Pentagon budget is a huge payout to military contractor corporations at the direct expense of the American people," Robert Weissman, the president of Public Citizen, said in a statement, calling the military policy legislation "a moral and political disgrace."
"The money wasted on the Pentagon... siphons funding away from reducing child poverty, expanding healthcare, addressing the climate crisis, and countless other priorities," Weissman continued. "This spending level is a testament to the corporate capture and corruption of the Pentagon budgeting process. It leaves the nation less secure and more unjust. It is an utter, total disgrace."
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), one of just 11 senators to vote against the NDAA, lamented that the bill provides the military with "many billions more than Congress has invested in addressing many of the biggest security concerns facing the American people—such as climate change, the opioid epidemic, poverty, hunger, and disease."
"Instead, it doubles down on the failed approach of pouring money into a bloated, inefficient, and sometimes counterproductive national security machine underwritten by an army of lobbyists and gold-plated contractors that fails to deliver on the needs of the American people," Markey added. "I simply cannot support it."
We can only change this by electing politicians who see the value in humanity first. Remember, they will reflect us if we make them.
Republicans are killing their own. Their politicians, from the top, like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, to their news media, like Fox News, OAN, and Newsmax, to their pundits, are lying to their constituents. As shown in a recent study reported by Medical Economics, they are getting Republicans killed.
After COVID-19 vaccines were available, Republicans had higher excess death rates than Democrats, with differences “concentrated in counties with lower vaccination rates.”
The findings were part of a study, “Excess Death Rates for Republicans and Democrats During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” published this fall by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Schwartz and Yale coauthors Jacob Wallace, PhD, assistant professor of public health, and Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, PhD, assistant professor of finance, examined 2017 voter registration records from Ohio and Florida, along with 577,659 deaths of people who died aged 25 years or older from January 2018 to December 2021.
“Excess deaths” – the percent increase in deaths above expected deaths due to seasonality, geographic location, political party affiliation and age – were similar for Republicans and Democrats in 2018 and early 2020. Both groups had a similar large spike in excess death in winter 2020-2021.
“However, in the summer of 2021 – after vaccines were widely available – the Republican excess death rate rose to nearly double that of Democrats, and this gap widened further in the winter of 2021,” the study said.
From March 2020 to December 2021, a time overlapping with the COVID-19 pandemic, average excess death rates were 76% higher among Republicans than Democrats. That grew to a 95% difference when measured from March 2020 to March 2021, and a 153% difference after April 5, 2021, “when all adults were eligible for COVID-19 vaccines in Florida and Ohio,” the study said.
“This sharp contrast in the excess death rate gap before and after vaccines were available suggests that vaccine take-up likely played an important role,” the study said. Factoring in county-level vaccination rates, areas with larger vaccination rates “saw much smaller excess death rate gaps between Republicans and Democrats (even after adjusting for county and age differences).”
One hopes that enough thinking Republicans will care enough about humanity over ideology to overcome another potential winter COVID catastrophe.
These subjects are the topics of discussion today on Politics Done Right on KPFT 90.1 FM Houston today at Noon Central Time (1 PM Eastern/10 AM Pacific/11 AM Mountain). You can listen to it on air at 90.1 FM in the Houston metropolitan area or at politicsdoneright.tv.
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